Objects and Oracle?

Greetings all!

Our company develops software to run under Windows using the toolbook package in the early development phases. We do everything using objects and fairly complex inheritance schemes. Our current task is to develop some software to act as a front end to some relational database system. We are currently trying to figure out if Oracle might do the job for us. We phoned the local Oracle outfit but their answers were very vague, to say the least. I hope that by asking to net, somebody out there will know more than our local Oracle folks.

Primarily, the database manager we seek should

• be a true RDBMS
• manage table creation and updates using SQL commands
• run under Windows 3.1 on top of DOS 5.0
• be callable from C (or C++) according to the DB2 standard of embedded SQL
• support referential integrity, transaction security (commit rollback), multiusers, networks, to name the few I can think of at the moment.

We discarded DBase since it's not really SQL at the root, and it's too much micro oriented. Our customers are more the Oracle, Informix, Ingres types.

If Oracle could only have offered us SQL*form, SQL*report, and other "closed" means of access, we would immediately have discarded it. But we recently heard about Oracle Card and Oracle Access. These last two tools might make Oracle open enough for our needs. Let's be clear about this, we want to keep the full control of our Windows application running on Novell by doing all the interface stuff using Borland C++ and toolbook. The key word I constantly hear in the office these days is "open". My understanding is that DB experts programming in C are fully aware of what this term implies. (I'm no DB expert)

I understand Oracle Card is related to Windows. Do we need that at all? Is it just a fancy Windows remake of old stuff, ie SQL*form and/or SQL*report? In which case we would never touch it.

Oracle Access seems to be a revamped version of Pro-C. What are the differences between the two? Is one better for objects than the other? For Windows?

I guess what we need is a way to access the power of SQL and RDBMS from within our own Windows applications. If anybody has played with those ideas and has something to report, please do so! We are also thinking about some small independent products that also boast of full SQL support, but Oracle is a big name and might look good on our company's record. We hope it won't prove too closed for our need. We are really new to DB stuff.

Thank you very much for any advice, Franky Received on Fri Aug 28 1992 - 23:44:43 CEST